Phonegap not propagating the session cookie - cookies

Using Phonegap-3.0.0+ios6.1, on a real iphone, on a real https domain handling the server side, many responses from different sources lead me to many trials and failures to deal with session cookies, I still cannot handle it correctly on an Iphone5+Phonegap app, although everything works perfectly in Iphone5+Safari.
Sources of info & Understanding
Cookies-in-PhoneGap. This suggest to use another transport mechanism to exchange the cookie between clients and server. Deal with the cookies on the wire (javascript set:document.cookie=... and get:xhr.getResponseHeader('Set-Cookie')) and keep it in Phonegap-html5-LocalStorage, to fetch it and reset it in the next ajax request.
Iphone & Phonegap. I have located this cocoa code in the file app>Classes>AppDelegate.m. I do not think I have to modify it. It seems by default activated. My php server still tell me Your session has timed out, or you have disabled cookies..
I have been dealing with this client-server for months in different contexts, always worked, until phonegap came into the picture.
Questions
From the web readings, phonegap should already be set to go for cookie support. Right or not ?
Does Phonegap really handle cookies by default (as is when creating a project) ?
Is cookie handling transport mechanism must be implemented by the developer ?
Thanks in advance.

Related

Cookies when using separate Dyno for react frontend and Django backend

I am building a simple web app using React.js for the frontend and Django for the server side.
Thus frontend.herokuapp.com and backend.herokuapp.com.
When I attempt to make calls to my API through the react app the cookie that was received from the API is not sent with the requests.
I had expected that I would be able to support this configuration without having to do anything special since all server-side requests would (I thought) be made by the JS client app directly to the backend process with their authentication cookies attached.
In an attempt to find a solution that I thought would work I attempted to set
SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN = "herokuapp.com"
Which while less than ideal (as herokuapp.com is a vast domain) in Production would seem to be quite safe as they would then be on api.myapp.com and www.myapp.com.
However, with this value set in settings.py I get an AuthStateMissing when hitting my /oauth/complete/linkedin-oauth2/ endpoint.
Searching google for AuthStateMissing SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN yields one solitary result which implies that the issue was reported as a bug in Django social auth and has since been closed without further commentary.
Any light anyone could throw would be very much appreciated.
I ran into the exact same problem while using herokuapp.com.
I even posted a question on SO here.
According to Heroku documentation:
In other words, in browsers that support the functionality, applications in the herokuapp.com domain are prevented from setting cookies for *.herokuapp.com
Heroku blocks cookies from frontend.herokuapp.com and backend.herokuapp.com
You need to add a custom domain to frontend.herokuapp.com and backend.herokuapp.com
The entire answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/54513216/1501643

HTTP 407 Proxy Authentication Required while accessing Amazon S3

I have tried everything but I cant seem to fix this issue that is happening for only one client behind a corporate proxy/firewall. Our Silverlight application connects to Amazon S3 for downloading/Uploading some documents. On one client and one client only it returns a 407 error and after that the application fails to save anything.
Inner Exception:
System.ServiceModel.ProtocolException: [UnexpectedHttpResponseCode]
Arguments: 407,Proxy Authentication Required
We had something similar at a different client but there was more of a CORS issue. to resolve this I used cloud-front to fake a sub-domain that then accesses the S3 bucket and it solved the issue. I was hoping it would fix it with this client as well but it didnt.
I have tried adding this code to web.config as suggested by a lot of answers
<system.net>
<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true" >
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>
I have read articles about passing a proxy headers with basis authentication using username and password but I am not sure how this would help us. The Proxy server is used by client and any authentication it requires is outside our domain.
**Additional Information**
The Silverlight code references 2 services. One is our wcf service that retrieves all the data for the application. One is The Amazon S3 service that uses the amazon Soap api, the endpoint for which is at http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/AmazonS3.wsdl?
If I go into our app and only use part of the system that dont make any calls to the Amazon S3 api the application works fine. As soon as I go to a part of the system that makes a call to the S3, the problem starts. funny enough the call to S3 goes fine and I can retrieve the doc fine but then any calls to our wcf service return 407.
Any ideas?
**Update 2**
Based on comments from Elliot Nelson I check the stack we were using for making http requests in our application. Turns out we are using client http for both http and https requests by default. Here is the code we have in the App.xaml constructor
public App()
{
Startup += Application_Startup;
UnhandledException += Application_UnhandledException;
InitializeComponent();
WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);
WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("https://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp);
}
Now, to understand the differences between clienthttp and browserhttp and when to use them. Also, the potential impacts/issues of switching to browserhttp.
**Update 3**
Is there a way to request browsers to run your in-browser Silverlight application in trusted mode and would it help bypass this issue?
(Answer #2)
So, most likely (for corporate environments like this network), almost nothing can be done without whatever custom proxy settings are set in IE, usually pushed by corporate policy. To take advantage of these proxy settings, you want to use WebRequestCreator.BrowserHttp, which automatically uses the browser's default settings when making requests.
There's a table of the differences between these two clients available in the Microsoft docs. I'm guessing you were using something (maybe setting custom headers or reading the raw response body) that wasn't supported in BrowserHttp.
For security reasons, you can't "ask" the browser what its proxy settings are and use them, so this is a tricky situation. You can specify Browser vs Client handling by domain, or even for a specific request (the same page above describes how); you may be able in this case to get away with just using ClientHttp for your service calls and BrowserHttp for your S3 calls, and avoid the problem altogether!
For next steps, I'd try that approach; if it doesn't work, I'd try switching wholesale to BrowserHttp just to see if it bypasses the proxy issue (there's almost no chance the application will actually work, since you're probably using ClientHttp-only options).
Long term, you may want to consider making changes to your services so they are usable by a BrowserHttp-only application (this would require you to be pretty basic in your requests/responses, but using only BrowserHttp would be a guarantee you'd work in pretty much any corp network).
Running in trusted mode is probably a group policy thing which would require their AD admins to approve / whitelist your app.
I think the underlying issue you are facing is that the proxy requires NTLM authentication and for whatever reason the browser declines to provide your app with that context.
One way to prove that it's an NTLM auth issue is to test with curl - get it to make a req through the proxy, then it should be a bit easier to code to. EG the following curl will get you through 99% of Windows corporate proxies (assuming the proxy is at proxy-host.corp:3128):
C:\> curl.exe -v --proxy proxy-host:3128 --proxy-user : --proxy-ntlm https://www.google.com
NOTE The --proxy-user : tells curl to use the current user session to perform the NTLM challenge.
So if you can get the client to run that, you can at least identify that NTLM works, then it's a just a matter of getting the app to perform the NTLM challenge using the default credentials (which may or may not be provided by the browser session)
Since you described this as a silverlight application, I'm going to assume you can't use classic browser-proxy troubleshooting like "move browser to public network" or "try a different browser", to isolate the problem.
You should try to isolate the proxy server, and have the customer use the required proxy-auth.
The application is making request, but it might be intercepted by a transparent proxy, or the result might be coming from what you consider a web server.
In the early days, the 401 error was pretty strictly associated with web-auth, and 407 was for proxy-auth.
Architecturally, the separation is a convenience, a web server can have both web server, proxy, and reverse-proxy behaviors.
What happens is your customer's environment is making a web connection to the destination, but it receives a HTTP 407 status from some host, probably their network, or sometimes the provider. Almost certainly the request is received not forwarded. The HTTP client your application lives in needs to provide the credentials that host requires. Companies have environments that are complex enough where often your customer will say this is the first time they have heard of this (some proxy-auth is also dynamic or destination specific).
Also, in some corporate environments, the operator will allow temporary or permanent white-listing from the proxy-auth service. You should see if they can do this, even temporarily, to confirm there aren't going to be other problems.
In the end, it sounds like your application might not robustly support proxy-auth, or the proxy-auth type they use in their environment.

Thinktecture IdentityModel token rejected

My Durandal SPA app performs BASIC authentication to acquire a session token which it then presents in headers to access Web API controller methods. This works fine.
On successful authentication I cache the access_token in localStorage so I can re-acquire it from local storage to preserve the session in the event of browser closure or refresh. The token is re-acquired but it is rejected by the server with an Unauthorized message.
This question starts by saying that the OP has successfully done what I am trying to do, so it's certainly possible, but the code he shows is a sample of (unsuccessfully) trying to do cookie mapping and I can't divine the nature of my problem from it.
One of the answers to this question says
Fortunately, WIF has a way to mitigate [replay attacks]. By configuring:
<identityConfiguration>
.......
<tokenReplayDetection enabled="true" />
.....
</identityConfiguration>
I do in fact have WIF installed on my development workstation, but I wouldn't know where to start looking for this setting. A search of my HDD found "tokenReplayDetection" in 17 System.IdentityModel related DLLs, but not in any config files.
Does anyone think this is in fact the problem and if so where does it live? Any other thoughts also gratefully received.

Understanding CORS

I've been looking on the web regarding CORS, and I wanted to confirm if whatever I made of it is, what it actually is.
Mentioned below is a totally fictional scenario.
I'll take an example of a normal website. Say my html page has a form that takes a text field name. On submitting it, it sends the form data to myPage.php. Now, what happens internally is that, the server sends the request to www.mydomain.com/mydirectory/myPage.php along with the text fields. Now, the server sees that the request was fired off from the same domain/port/protocol
(Question 1. How does server know about all these details. Where does it extract all these details froms?)
Nonetheless, since the request is originated from same domain, it server the php script and returns whatever is required off it.
Now, for the sake of argument, let's say I don't want to manually fill the data in text field, but instead I want to do it programmatically. What I do is, I create a html page with javascript and fire off a POST request along with the parameters (i.e. values of textField). Now since my request is not from any domain as such, the server disregards the service to my request. and I get cross domain error?
Similarly, I could have written a Java program also, that makes use of HTTPClient/Post request and do the same thing.
Question 2 : Is this what the problem is?
Now, what CORS provide us is, that the server will say that 'anyone can access myPage.php'.
From enable cors.org it says that
For simple CORS requests, the server only needs to add the following header to its response:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Now, what exactly is the client going to do with this header. As in, the client anyway wanted to make call to the resources on server right? It should be upto server to just configure itself with whether it wants to accept or not, and act accordingly.
Question 3 : What's the use of sending a header back to client (who has already made a request to the server)?
And finally, what I don't get is that, say I am building some RESTful services for my android app. Now, say I have one POST service www.mydomain.com/rest/services/myPost. I've got my Tomcat server hosting these services on my local machine.
In my android app, I just call this service, and get the result back (if any). Where exactly did I use CORS in this case. Does this fall under a different category of server calls? If yes, then how exactly.
Furthermore, I checked Enable Cors for Tomcat and it says that I can add a filter in my web.xml of my dynamic web project, and then it will start accepting it.
Question 4 : Is that what is enabling the calls from my android device to my webservices?
Thanks
First of all, the cross domain check is performed by the browser, not the server. When the JavaScript makes an XmlHttpRequest to a server other than its origin, if the browser supports CORS it will initialize a CORS process. Or else, the request will result in an error (unless user has deliberately reduced browser security)
When the server encounters Origin HTTP header, server will decide if it is in the list of allowed domains. If it is not in the list, the request will fail (i.e. server will send an error response).
For number 3 and 4, I think you should ask separate questions. Otherwise this question will become too broad. And I think it will quickly get close if you do not remove it.
For an explanation of CORS, please see this answer from programmers: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/253043/139479
NOTE: CORS is more of a convention. It does not guarantee security. You can write a malicious browser that disregards the same domain policy. And it will execute JavaScript fetched from any site. You can also create HTTP headers with arbitrary Origin headers, and get information from any third party server that implements CORS. CORS only works if you trust your browser.
For question 3, you need to understand the relationship between the two sites and the client's browser. As Krumia alluded to in their answer, it's more of a convention between the three participants in the request.
I recently posted an article which goes into a bit more detail about how CORS handshakes are designed to work.
Well I am not a security expert but I hope, I can answer this question in one line.
If CORS is enabled then server will just ask browser if you are calling the request from [xyz.com]? If browser say yes it will show the result and if browser says no it is from [abc.com] it will throw error.
So CORS is dependent on browser. And that's why browsers send a preflight request before actual request.
In my case I just added
.authorizeRequests().antMatchers(HttpMethod.OPTIONS, "/**").permitAll()
to my WebSecurityConfiguration file issue is resolved

Is there a web service that spits out the entire request that was sent?

I apologize if this isn't "programming" worthy. I'm wondering if a service exists that when the HTTP service is pinged, it echos back the exact same request you made as the response.
The reason I want this is I want to UnitTest a class I made to build requests and send them over a socket. I realize I could just do a Mock object of some sort, but I think that involves more complexity than just making sure the request being sent was properly built.
Ideally, the web service would send the content back as proper HTTP 1.1 with the request info I sent in the body of the response.
Thanks!
Kyle
-- edit --
Just a quick reference to the solution. Point your browser to: http://scooterlabs.com/echo.json or http://scooterlabs.com/echo.xml
This guy seemed to have the same problem as you web service echo test
Refers to some links you might be interested in
I guess there are some uses for a simple echo, but in any kind of a realistic interaction it's going to be pretty hard to isolate just the piece you are trying to test.
A more general approach would be to use a local proxy server, stands as the man in the middle
between you and all remote sites, and can log urls, responses, content and so on.
If you're developing the server side as well as the client, you definitely ought to run a
local mirror of the server site.